Galleons
ride the Norfolk coast like tributes to the sea. This
land has taken its living from the ocean, but if the
North Sea looks after its own, it also takes its terrible
toll. All along this coast the evidence of incurcions
scars the land, a scrawled memory of the dead. As
recently as 1953, dozens of lives were lost when the
stormy waters broke through. Salthouse church became an
island, the villagers rescuing what few possessions they
could and hauling them up to the one secure building in
the parish. It must have always been so. Blakeney church
too stands high above the tide line, ready, waiting.

Over the
centuries, so many more lives were lost on the waters
themselves, and these losses are remembered again and
again in the churches. But the churches themselves are
ships, riding the swell of the coast. Where did the money
come from for these massive 14th and 15th century
rebuildings?

The wealth of
England in the late Middle Ages was, as at any time in
history, concentrated where raw materials could be found,
and goods could be processed and exported. In the 15th
century this meant, above all, cloth woven from wool. The
markets abroad were accessed through Flanders from east
coast ports, of which there were many. But the success of
these east coast ports created a market of its own, and
this needed to be provisioned, not least from the fishing
stocks of the grey German Ocean. The great port of
Blakeney Haven stretched from the river mouth between
Cley and Wiveton as far east as Salthouse quay, a
medieval conurbation run by hard-nosed business men who
employed local people in their hundreds on the boats and
the port sides. Because of the connection with the
continent, Dutch was probably as widely spoken as
English, and foreign, even black, faces would have not
been an unfamiliar sight in the streets of Blakeney and
Cley.

The wealth of
these great merchant houses was new money. As England was
a Catholic nation, the merchant classes prioritised
prayers for their souls after their deaths, and left
bequests in the form of chantry money and wills that
would rebuild the churches, filling them with screens,
roods, altars, images and glass that not only asked us to
remember them, but asserted the official doctrine of the
Catholic Church.

It is almost
unimaginable today. It is, perhaps, possible to stand in
Wiveton churchyard, gazing across to Cley, and comprehend
the harbour mouth between the two. Now, it is all pasture
land and copses. Further up river, the quayside at
Blakeney is still easy for the mind to populate with busy
merchants and traders, but Salthouse is now a lonely
outpost, far from anywhere really, only the wheeling
seabirds giving it sound above the rushing of the wind
from the water.

Blakeney
Haven is not alone in being a major English port now lost
to us - but there was another factor here that made it an
even more significant place. Barely ten miles inland is
the great shrine of Walsingham, and Blakeney Haven was
the nearest port. In days when it was easier to travel
from London or Bristol by sea than by land - indeed,
easier to travel by sea from even Ipswich and Norwich - a
significant proportion of boats putting in here must have
let off pilgrims, brushing themselves down, stretching,
ready for the last leg of their journey via Binham Priory
to Walsingham shrine itself.

All this came
to an end with Henry VIII's greedy supression of the
monasteries in the 1530s, and pilgrimage itself was dealt
its death-blow by the fortunately short-lived protestant
impositions of his son Edward VI. But it was not just
Catholicism that was lost to the Norfolk countryside. The
English Reformation created an insular country that sat
ill in an increasingly disunited Europe. At Salthouse,
graffiti of great sailing ships remind us of what bored
clerks could see from the window during those
interminable sermons, the galleons that the pirates Drake
and Raleigh used as they plundered the wealth of the New
World and of Spanish traders. But these great boats were
headed for Lynn and the Humber, not for Blakeney Haven,
which became increasingly sidelined.

By the late
17th century, it was as profitable to use the land for
grazing pasture as for trade. Local landowners began to
dam the river for rich saltmarsh, and canalise it for
irrigation. Norfolk farming was at the forefront of world
agriculture, but at a terrible cost, for the river silted
up, and first Salthouse and Blakeney, then Cley and
Wiveton at the river mouth, fell into decay.

Today, these
great churches bear witness to their glory days, but also
to the generally admirable efforts of the Victorians in
rescuing them. They are, of course, wholly unsuited for
the present needs of the Church of England, but all four
are successfully finding ways of being, and in doing so
of surviving, and finding a future. Today, this coastline
is busy again, but the visitors are tourists and
holiday-makers. The North Norfolk coast is fashionable
and expensive, but when you look at the horror that is
Yarmouth, Hopton and the east coast of the county, it is
a preferable option. And the presence of so many visitors
has encouraged all four churches to be open everyday, for
which we can be thankful, if a little wistful when we
conjure up what we have lost.

Thanks To
Tom, as ever, for making my visits to these four churches
possible.